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Dr Rosalea Monacella, Co-Director OUTR, Assoc Prof. Landscape Architecture, RMIT University:
Transiting Cities is a competition which has emerged out of a body of research
which we've been undertaking in OUTR for over five years now.
Tom Harper, Research Fellow OUTR, School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University:
We're asking for a range of stakeholders and practitioners from around the world
but also in Latrobe to speculate on the low carbon future for that region.
Dr Rosalea Monacella: In La Trobe Valley we might transform it from being dominated by the coal industry
to something that might actually allow it to be much more resilient to economic and political change.
Craig Douglas, Co-Director OUTR, Senior Lecturer Landscape Architecture, RMIT University:
I think the problem with understanding transiting cities and therefore designing and thinking about them in the future
is understanding that all parts relate to each other
and not all of these parts are static or conventionally understood
and so how do we relate these parts to each other, how do we understand them
and how do we work with them through this discipline of design?
Dr Julian Bolleter, Assistant Prof, Australian Urban Design Research Centre (AUDRC):
In terms of Australian cities, as transiting cities, as growing cities
I think it's about, as always, it's about the nexus between sustainability and livability.
Prof Daine Alcorn, Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research and Innovation, RMIT University:
And my understanding of a transiting city, in this context, is really one that's decided it needs to change
and goes through a transition process, probably with some aims and objectives about
how it wants to come out at the other end and a lot of community engagement about that.
Enriqueta Llabres, Dir. Relational Urbanism, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University:
Basically, if you understand what is the concept of design is making sense of things
so actually technology and design are intimately related in order to innovate.
Design provides meanings provide this making sense of things to the technology.
Esther Anatolitisn, Director, Regional Arts Victoria:
Experimentation, creativity, all these tools that we give our designers
we need to be able to then come back and say,
hey, use the whole pallet; let's really do something exciting.
Craig Douglas: I think the priority for designing the transiting city is about understanding the city to be
a dynamic landscape in a constant state of flux.
Prof Daine Alcorn: Our priority is really community engagement, government engagement, council engagement
so that the design takes a lot of points of view.
Cr Ed Vermeulen, Mayor, Latrobe City Council:
That marrying of the vision, collective vision, individual visions and
people having the skills to come up with real concepts and then details
is so important to have that right across the board, I think.
Dr Julian Bolleter: So we have the option now to either grow our cities to become megacities
at which point we can expect the livability to plummet.
Alternatively, we can look at the cities breaking off and becoming rather megacity regions
or polycentric regions of urbanism, at which point maybe we can maintain our livability
and then might become more sustainable and be able to accommodate more people.
Prof Andrew Benjamin, Professor, Critical Theory and Philosophical Aesthetics, Monash University:
Anyone who's flown over Canberra or flown over Melbourne sees immediately the problem;
in some sense, you ought to be able to pick up the suburbs that spread out like a growth on skin,
fold them over, make them denser.
Andrew Wisdom, Principal, Arup:
Latrobe Valley is kind of a little bit like Victoria's equivalent of Christchurch,
it is the place where change is happening the fastest.
Dr Darryn Snell, Senior Lecturer, Centre for Sustainable Organisations, RMIT University:
Increasingly, and at a local level in the Latrobe Valley, it's that history of having transition done to them
that they have become much more involved, proactive and energised, if you like, to manage that transition much differently
and at a much more local level.
Cr Ed Vermeulen: We need to have a far more diversified economy and an economy that can still be based on brown coal into the future
but to do so in a responsible and sustainable way.
RIchard Elkington, Chair, Regional Development Australia (Gippsland)
The future of the power industry and the brown coal sector
is somewhat clouded and therefore the urgency, in this case, is to develop, I think, a vision of the future
Cr Ed Vermeulen: We're at the horizon, we can see where we're going and
we haven't reached that point yet but I'm confident we can reach that in six to eight years' time.
Richard Elkington: The possibility of having a great amount of international attention focused on the Latrobe Valley
because of the expected pace of the transition
is something we will become excited about
so we're really looking forward to this competition.